The world is struggling economically. In its latest World Economic Outlook, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that the global economy would grow by about 3% this year. In early 2014, by contrast, it was projecting that global growth in 2015 would be almost 4%. Most of this decline was related to emerging markets.

On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 257,000 jobs in January and increased its estimate of last year’s job gains. The 3.1 million jobs that were added in 2014 according to the latest numbers were the most since the turn of the century, and 2015 seems to be off to a strong start as well. So what does this job market boom mean for your portfolio? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is “probably not much.”

Emerging market stocks haven’t done particularly well in recent years, but Brazilian stocks have done especially poorly. From 2010 through 2013, Brazilian stocks substantially underperformed emerging markets as a whole in each calendar year. So far this year, however, Brazilian stocks have outpaced their emerging market peers. Does this reversal herald a comeback for Brazil’s stock market?

More than 5 years after the most acute phase of America’s financial crisis, the US unemployment rate is still far above its pre-crisis level. In a series of articles during the past few months, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers suggested that the economy may be in a persistently depressed state (a “secular stagnation” in the technical jargon). The article sparked renewed debate among economists about whether such a prolonged slump was theoretically possible, and if so, whether the economy was in one right now.